


Pieces of Lockwood

by Tamar10



Category: Lockwood & Co. - Jonathan Stroud
Genre: Angst, Book 3: The Hollow Boy, F/M, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-23 00:31:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10708392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tamar10/pseuds/Tamar10
Summary: Setting after The hollow boy.Lockwood has to carry on without Lucy, but his life is no longer the same. Something broke inside him.





	Pieces of Lockwood

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! This is my frist story on this fandom and also my frist story on AOOO. I published many stories on other sites but now I would to start to publish my stories in english (I'm italian so until this moment I wrote only in italian).  
> I hope my grammatical/lessical skills are good enogh to let you enjoy this story, anyway if you have any suggestion/correction just tell me.

It had hurt, a keen sharp pain.

Like the one he had felt for the punch against the mirror, after he had come back home without her. He had seen his picture shatter, the reflection of his face split in half by a big rift. Then, with unbelievable slow, the glass fragments had began to crumbling, making a sound like a laugh, and from there on it had been only a picking up the pieces for Lockwood.

Picking them up even if he knew that nothing would ever have come back the same, there would be always missing pieces.

 

One morning he woke up before the others. He’d never had a peaceful sleep, but in the least month even staying in the bed trying to fall asleep had become a torture. So he had gone into the kitchen and he made a tea to try to calm down.

He was sitting at the table with the smoking cup in one hand when his glance fell on the thinking cloth. In the middle, between a shopping list from a hundred years ago and a phone number, there was a quick message written with the Lucy’s unmistakable handwriting: “ _I’ll be back soon_ ”.

Lockwood realized to have drop the cup only when he heard the noise of broken ceramic and felt spray of hot tea on his legs. Only after some long seconds he was able to turn away the sight from the written and to clean the floor with mechanic movements, he acted with the strange sensation to have the brain disconnected from the rest of his body, like in a dream. Indeed he was awake, a sudden pain in the sole of the right foot confirmed it. He was cut by a piece of the cup and now a small trickle of blood was flooding from the wound.

Lockwood sensed the pain, but he couldn’t _feel_ it. He still had in his ears the echo of the pottery that crashed in pieces and he asked himself if it was normal that he was feeling himself so broken too.

When George and Holly woke up the floor was clean and the potsherds had already been thrown in the garbage in the garden, Lockwood was smiling from the table laden with food for breakfast. Under the box of cookies, the jams, the blows full of cereal and the dishes covered with toasts the new thinking cloth stood out unblemished.

 

There were some moments – and it was useless to delude himself there wouldn’t have been more – in which suddenly Lockwood looked up, certain to see her near to him while she was eating something, messed up and tired by the adventures of the night, or she was sitting at her desk focused on the reading of a book taken from the home library. Instead every time he stared at nothing, an empty place, and it hurt to remember that it was only an old reflex. She wasn’t there.

She would never have been there.

He still wasn’t be able to realize it, as he wasn’t be able not to look for her shape – the flying skirt and the shoulder length hair – in the darkness of any hunted house or in the middle of a fight during a case. As he wasn’t be able not to feel a painful stab every time he saw only ghosts, even if he didn’t realized that not all the ghosts were made of ectoplasm.

 

It was cold, in December in London you couldn’t hope for something different, but that day was particularly cold and the rain that had been falling continuously since three days painted the world with gray and dump filters. The passers-by wandered indistinguishable, bundled up in long coat and with their faces hidden by the umbrellas, not even the end of the Chelsea’s epidemic and the forthcoming Christmas seemed to be able to obliterate the glumness weighted on the souls.

Lockwood walked fast, driven by the urgent wish to be home before he had to come out again for work. In his head there were the usual thoughts that were plaguing him in that period and which he wasn’t able to drive away completely. Thoughts gloomier than the sky upon him.

Then, unexpectedly, his heart missed a beat. On the other side of the street a painfully familiar figure stood out against the light of a shop window, busy into staring at something exposed. First he felt the instinct to call her, to reach her and to talk to her; but he restrained himself. It was weird to saw her there, so near after all that time, and yet she didn’t seem to be changed an iota.

He wondered what she was doing, if she was feeling alone, if she was passing through the same things he was passing through. He would like to go to talk to her to find a way to fix everything, but he knew it would be useless as well as harmful. He thought about the blue package with a silver bow closed in a corner of his wardrobe. It would never have caught up with its addressee that Christmas.

He closed his eyes and kept walking with anger, until the shops became rarer and rarer and the street became less and less frequented. He kicked absently an empty bottle of beer that had been left on the sidewalk. The bottle landed a few meters farther and the noise of broken glasses was barely muffled by the rain.

There was something in Lockwood’s heart that hurt and cut like a splinter of glass. He watch the fragment of the bottle and immediately he regretted what he did, he learned that the things that fall apart are difficult to repair. He’d like to throw the pieces of glass somewhere, he didn’t want someone to get injured because he knew how much it hurt. Indeed he stayed there for a little while to experience the rain that flowed on him and then he went away. There were others pieces that he had to try to fix.

 

He threw himself headlong into work, as if the successes archived by the Lockwood&Co could soothe his torments somehow, as if the suddenly improved good reputation of the Agency could convince Lucy to come back. It was a scenario that he had dreamed many times, both for consolation and for revenge, but still he didn’t know how he’d react actually. Because sometimes forgetting is difficult as much as forgiving.

He had put back together the fragments, piece by piece, cutting and hurting himself. He wasn’t be able to look at his reflection in the mirror anymore. The wounds were still fresh and some scars would have been there for ever.

He knew that it was like tossing salt over them when the morning he read the newspaper not only to check what they wrote about the Lockwood&Co, but also to find her name. And it was an another thin glass sliver stuck in his heart every time he saw that next to the other agencies’ names.

However in the meantime he began to smile more often; he smiled fascinatingly to the press, politely to the clients, with respect to Penelope Fittes. He smiled more than usual even to George and Holly – confidently or recklessly by the case –, but they weren’t fooled.

Lockwood smiled continuously, but never in _that_ way. The grin, that could light so extraordinarily his whole person, was gone.


End file.
